Taterskin & The Eco Defenders: Book 2, Chapter 27
Book 2 ("Tell It to Future Generations"), Chapter 27 of 56
CHAPTER 27
We landed our vehicles in the most secluded part of Central Park in the wee hours of the morning. More specifically, it was around 3 am, underneath a spreading chestnut tree.
After consulting together through the rest of the night and early morning, we came up with a plan that we felt was novel, unique, and foolproof.
Our aim was to expose the exploitation of workers and to institute improvements in working conditions for them, not only in their pay (increasing it) and work hours (decreasing them), but also as regards the use of children — who should be in school or playing, not slaving away in sweatshops to make fat cats fatter and richer. We also wanted to help make workplaces safer.
Unless we prevented it from happening, there would be a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in late March of this year of 1911. The blaze would kill 146 workers, mostly young, overworked, and underpaid immigrant women — some of whom would die from smoke inhalation, some from being burned alive, and others from falling off the woefully inadequate fire escape which, when used when it was needed most, collapsed in a Mobius strip-like heap of twisted metal. Many others perished when they jumped out of the 8th and 9th story windows to escape the flames at their back, or when they fell or were pushed out by the panicking crowd behind them.
It was Albert, Alexis, Ravelle, Chapawee, Tubthumper, Stripes, Rory, and I who discussed our strategy until dawn. Meanwhile, Rovette slept with the pups, and the rest slumbered away, too. Well, not all: Yukyuk stayed awake with us, as she’s a night-owl, but she had no input or feedback regarding our plans. Creativity is not her strong suit.
Ooga told us the next morning that he had dreamt about the fire, and how we quenched it and saved all the people. Although our plan was to prevent the raging inferno from happening in the first place, and secure better working conditions for all, I must admit that Ooga’s dream, had it been real, would have been even more exciting and fun than what ended up happening in reality.
This is what Ooga told us about it:
There I was, standing outside the building; someone yelled ‘Fire!’ and pointed up to the eighth floor. Everything occurred in a blur after that. It was as if time and space collapsed in on themselves and everything was happening at the same time and everywhere at once.
I had some of my Gorilla and Orangutan friends with me, by my side. We were watching the orange flames grow and spread. Then we saw windows open, and people stick their heads out and start screaming. Without even saying anything to each other — we all seemed to be thinking with one mind; we were on the same wavelength, so to speak — we started scaling the building, climbing from window to window by grabbing on to the sill above us and pulling ourselves up, floor by floor.
When we reached the people, some were more afraid of us than they were of the fire, and backed away, but we gestured to them to approach us. We tried to talk to them, but they had no Doolittles, of course. Then we used gestures to show them how we would carry them down. Once one brave girl decided to chance it and risk her life to my care, the others watched to see what would happen.
I held this young girl — she couldn’t have been more than 16 years old — against my body with my left arm, and climbed back down using only my right. In a matter of mere seconds we had reached the street, and I handed her over to a policeman, who whisked her away to someplace safer. I immediately made a return trip up the side of the building, and since they had seen their friend make it safely to the ground, there was no more hesitation on the part of the workers about entrusting themselves into our care.
Meanwhile, Tubthumper and Chumbawumba were spraying water on the fire from the street with their trunks. They were able to extinguish the worst part of the blaze — that is, the flames that were closest to the people at the windows — giving us time to evacuate them all before it was too late.
As you know, the doors they should have been able to use to exit down the stairways were locked, and the fire escape was in no shape to withstand the weight of more than a few people at a time, thus our flamboyant and dramatic method of rescuing them was necessary.
While we were deadheading up the wall, and coming back down with our human cargo, all of the spiders in the area had assembled and were working together and spinning a giant web at record speed. When the Charlottes (I call Spiders ‘Charlottes’) got this done, they had created a huge Life net just above the street. Once it was ready, to save time, we simply threw those waiting to be rescued from the ledge out the window and onto the net. As soon as one had been lifted out by the firemen down below, we threw the next one. In this way, we Eco Defenders, working together with the firemen and policemen, were able to save every last one of the workers that had been trapped in the building.
When I was interviewed by a news reporter about my role in the rescue, I told him that the people were probably afraid of me at first because of the movie about a King named Kong, which grossly misrepresented Apes and made those who had seen the movie afraid of us. The reporter had no idea what I was talking about, though. I then realized that naturally he didn’t, as that movie didn’t come out until the 1930s, and there we were in 1911. I later found out that supposedly the scene in that flick where the Gorilla carries a woman around the outside of a skyscraper was based on our exploits, but they got it all wrong: In the stupid movie they made, there was no fire; there was only one woman; and there was only one Gorilla — and he wasn’t even saving her from a fire! Typical Hollywood crap, I say. They always take an interesting story and worsify it.
But that was only a dream. Although a nice dream. In real life, we wanted to get there before the fire had even broken out, so as to prevent it, and also solve the other problems that led up to the catastrophe in the first place.
That being the case, it was time to get to work implementing the idea we had come up with the night before. It did not have the same cachet or pizzazz as Ooga’s dream, but it would be every bit as effective, if not more so.
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